In past few decades, a lot of work such as research, discovery and innovation has been done in various fields of technology. It is desired that findings of such researches, discoveries and innovations be shared among the research community for a progressive development in respective fields thereof. Sometimes, the findings of researches, discoveries and innovations are published by their authors in a form of articles, theses, journals, research papers and so forth. At other times, research organizations end up doing experiments that have been already done by some other research organizations (or personnel). The research organizations are unaware of such experiments, as findings of these experiments are not published, and therefore, are not available in the public domain. Typically, an experiment does not get published, when one of the following happens:
the experiment has failed to prove a hypothesis, that is, the hypothesis is proven to be false,
the direction of a research organization (where the experiment was performed) has changed, post the experiment, or
the experiment has been done in an academic setting (for example, for a doctorate thesis).
In order to create synergy among the research community, exchange of unpublished documents/findings of experiments needs to be facilitated in an easy to use, yet secured manner.
Conventionally, digital platforms (like Elsevier®) provide access to published documents on a subscription-basis. However, such platforms only deal with the published documents, but do not deal with unpublished documents. Currently, even if some research organization (or personnel) is interested in sharing the unpublished experimental findings with others, there is no real-time mechanism for secured exchange and fair valuation of technical documents.
Moreover, authors are reluctant in sharing their unpublished documents on such digital platforms for several reasons. Conventionally, the documents are stored at the digital platforms for sharing them further with interested consumers (for example, such as other research organizations). Consequently, the conventional digital platforms suffer with a risk of data misuse, data theft and other threats caused due to lack of security. Additionally, conventional digital platforms do not authenticate and validate users uploading new documents, and therefore, are incapable of preventing plagiarism. Moreover, upon publishing the documents on the conventional digital platforms, the authors do not have any control over how the documents are shared and with whom they are shared.
Therefore, in light of the foregoing discussion, there exists a need to overcome the aforementioned drawbacks associated with the conventional digital platforms for executing access transaction of the document.